|
Davis Maraniss,
author of
They
Marched Into Sunlight
______________________________________________
For those living during the sixties, personal perspectives on the era's
tumultuous world routinely changed instantly. For some, images of civil
rights and Vietnam war protestors being beaten brought new meaning to the
idea of justice and provoked active participation, while for others a numbered
ball picked out of a lottery barrel would alter an entire life's journey.
Morley Safer's television reporting from the front lines of Vietnam
and Walter Cronkite's nightly reading of the body count stimulated hope and
pride in some, fear and rage in others -- and often a little of both in everyone.
In They Marched Into Sunlight, Washington Post reporter David
Maraniss draws together in one interwoven story the disparate worlds of soldiers
in Vietnam, student protesters in the United States, and government officials
in Washington. He achieves this dramatic unity by focusing on a few
days in October 1967, when two battles took place simultaneously. In
Vietnam, the famed Black Lions battalion of the Army's First Infantry Division
was walking into an ambush in which sixty-one U.S. soldiers were killed and
another sixty wounded. On the campus of the University of Wisconsin
in Madison, hundreds of students were clashing violently with police during
a protest against recruiters for the Dow Chemical Company, which manufactured
napalm and Agent Orange. Meanwhile, in the nation's capital, President
Lyndon Johnson was considering whether to run for re-election in 1968, hearing
conflicting reports from his advisors, and bemoaning his growing sense that
"the people just do not understand the war."
Maraniss presents a dazzling portrayl of America in the midst of a disaster,
and examines political and cultural struggles over patriotism and dissent,
heroism and conscience, the duties of a free people and government manipulation
of the truth. Ultimately he shows how momentus national decisions affect
the lives of real people in indelible ways, and illuminates the profound
ways in which Vietnam and the sixties continue to influence
us.*
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist discusses his book with us in a November,
2003 Jerry Jazz Musician interview.
Interview Topics
Why this book?
The attitude
of the soldiers prior to the battle
North Vietnam's view
of the war protests
The mission of the Black
Lions battalion
The dispute among battalion
leaders
The Army's explanation of
the ambush
Madison,
Wisconsin at the vanguard of sixties cultural change
Dow Chemical's expectation
of the Pentagon
Deciding to protest
Dow's campus presence
University police
plan to deal with protest
Vivid images of the protest
Jane Brotman letter to her
father
Lyndon Johnson
The affects
of napalm and Agent Orange on soldiers
Soldier's view of protests
Differences
and similarities between Vietnam and Iraq
About David Maraniss
______________________________________________
photo Wisconsin State Journal
University of Wisconsin protestors shouting "Sieg heil!" at police,
October 17, 1967
"Our students are greatly concerned with what they perceive to be injustice,
and some are very active in mounting protests and demonstrations both on
campus and in the larger community...Great universities have always been
bases of energetic contention and dispute. At no time have students
taken matters more seriously than now. The faculty have vigorously
supported the constitutional rights of students, which includes the right
to dissent and to protest. I trust that we will never deny these rights.
I said these things three weeks ago and I wish to affirm these principles
today. As I said then and repeat today, there is much for young men
and women to be upset about on the national and international scene."
- University of Wisconsin chancellor William Sewell
*
The Times They Are A-Changin'  , by Bob Dylan
______________________________________________
JJM
They Marched Into Sunlight focuses on three events taking place
within a forty-eight hour period in October, 1967. One was a battle in South
Vietnam, another at a protest at the University of Wisconsin, and the third
in the White House. This is a huge story you undertook. What compelled you
to write this book?
DM In all of my previous books -- whether
it was the biography of Bill Clinton or the biography of Green Bay Packer
coach Vince Lombardi -- they wove through the sixties at some point. With
Clinton it was his dealing with the draft during Vietnam and his political
viability as a result of his actions, and with Lombardi it was the symbol
of discipline and the old ways, winning football championships while the
culture was changing around him in the sixties. As I got to those points
in each of the books, I realized that my interest and energy increased, probably
because I am part of the post-war baby boom generation whose world view was
shaped by the events of the sixties. So, I thought at some point I would
want to do a book just about Vietnam and the sixties. I knew there was great
literature on the war itself and some on the anti-war movement, but I hadn't
seen a book that tried to bring together into one interwoven narrative these
two very different worlds that were really about the same thing. That was
the genesis of this book.
JJM Early in the book, you published correspondence
that took place among some of the soldiers in the elite Black Lions battalion
and their families, and in one of them, a reel to reel recording, soldier
Mike Troyer told his family, "Not that I feel like marchin' in any protest
against Vietnam, but this war is worthless. I'll tell the president himself,
this damn war, it just ain't worth it." Was this a common theme among the
Black Lions?
DM I wouldn't call it a common theme, but
it was one of the many crosscurrents of frustration that they were starting
to feel in 1967. It is likely I would have found more letters and tapes of
that sort a few years later. 1967 was right when everything was starting
to change, and Troyer and only a few other soldiers in that battalion were
writing about it in that fashion.
| JJM The soldiers certainly turned more
cynical after that.
DM Yes, shortly after, everything changed
both at home and in Vietnam. At the time of my book, the American troops
had been in Vietnam in force for more than two years. Twelve thousand soldiers
had already been killed, but there were another forty-five thousand yet to
be killed after that point.
JJM
At what point did the North Vietnamese begin to suspect that the war
protests would be as important as the armed conflict itself?
DM The North Vietnamese had a pretty
sophisticated understanding of the different pressures that they could use
on their side. Even as early as 1965 -- when American troops like the First
Infantry Division I write about initially arrived in Vietnam -- there was
an understanding in Hanoi that the division that existed in America over
our involvement in the war could help them, since their whole strategy was
to outlast the Americans, and create a stalemate that would force the American
troops to eventually leave. |
photo by Verland Gilbertson
Members of the Black Lions, including Terry Allen (center,
without helmet), and Clark Welch (right)
*
"I've got three words for the army and I'll tell LBJ himself or
Westmoreland, makes no difference. 'F___K The Army.'"
- Black Lions battalion member Mike Troyer
|
JJM Was there a notion among the American
soldiers that they were being used by both the North Vietnamese and their
own government?
DM I don't know if they felt they were being
used, but they felt confused about what their mission was, and what they
were doing in a country where they didn't really know friend from foe. It
created an enormous amount of psychological and physical pressure on them
every day. Up through 1967, there probably was a feeling among the majority
of the soldiers that they were fighting for a good cause, and I think that
started to change right at the point of this book.
JJM
What was the particular mission of the men of the Black Lions battalion
before they were ambushed?
DM They were on what was called a "search
and destroy" mission, which was the essential strategy of the American commanders
in Vietnam, led by General William Westmoreland. Their missions involved
going out into the jungle, search for enemy soldiers -- whether they were
Viet Cong or North Vietnamese army - - find them, fix them in place, and
kill them. With these battles of attrition, it was felt that America would
win the war. It was a misplaced strategy, so evident by the results of the
morning of October 17. The Black Lions battalion went out on a search and
destroy mission and got destroyed itself.
photo First Infantry
Terry Allen
*
photo Clark Welch collection
Clark Welch |
JJM
There was some dispute about how that mission should have been
handled in the first place between the battalion leaders, Terry Allen and
Clark Welch.
DM Yes, that's right. Welch was the commander
for one of the companies under Terry Allen, the battalion commander. Allen
was the son of General Terry Allen, commander of the Big Red One in North
Africa during World War II, and Welch was a great soldier. Welch had been
involved in a skirmish in that part of the jungle the day before, thought
it was incredibly foolish to go back the same way again on the morning of
the seventeenth, and tried to talk the battalion command out of doing so,
but wasn't heard. In the book, I attempt to show that it wasn't just the
battalion commander who made the mistake in going forward with the mission
-- it was also because of pressure they felt coming all the way down from
Lyndon Johnson, who at that point of the war desperately wanted to show that
the Americans were prevailing, and that the press was getting it wrong, which
of course has some echoes of today. That pressure to just go out there and
find and kill Viet Cong went down to General Westmoreland, who believed in
these battles of attrition, and down to the First Infantry Division and the
Black Lions battalion of Terry Allen.
JJM
In light of all of this, how did the Army explain the ambush?
DM They lied about it. They essentially tried
to make the claim that the Americans won this battle. They fabricated the
body count -- which I document in the book -- by adding up the same bodies
again and again. Their press releases were calling it a victory, saying that
one-hundred-three Viet Cong were killed when in fact there were probably
less than twenty. They tried to say it was not an ambush, because it was
embarrassing to have a battalion of the great First Infantry Division ambushed.
They did everything possible to try to minimize it. What really struck me
about this is when I interviewed all the soldiers involved in this battle,
the lie about the battle infuriated them the most. It dishonored them, to
make it look like something that it wasn't. |
| JJM Yes, speaking to that, Troyer recorded,
"If you get anything in the papers about Shenandoah II (the name of the mission),
you can send it to me. I want to see the papers and how they are going to
lie about it. See what they're gonna say. 'Cause I know what happened out
there. I wanna see what they'll say about it. They'll say things we really
didn't do." The lying that went on must have been difficult for the soldiers
to deal with.
DM All of them had trouble with that, Clark
Welch as much as anyone, even thirty years after the battle. He was a true
believer going into the battle. He believed in the cause, he believed in
his soldiers, and he came out of the battle completely disillusioned.
JJM During this same period of time,
a few hundred University of Wisconsin students were making plans to protest
the on-campus recruiting appearance of Dow Chemical, makers of napalm and
Agent Orange. How did Madison, Wisconsin become in the vanguard of sixties
cultural change?
DM Madison had a long progressive tradition.
The Progressive Party came out of Madison, and it had a strong anti-war aspect
to it for generations. It also had a very strong university that attracted
students from all over the country and had a motto of "sifting and winnowing,"
which encouraged dissent, disagreement and discussion. Many of the students
were second and third generation Jewish students from the East coast, whose
parents and grandparents had been kept out of Ivy League schools by quotas,
and they came to Wisconsin and Michigan generations earlier, and those traditions
continued. So there were a wide variety of reasons for attracting different
types of thinkers from around the country for a long time, and it was therefore
one of the five or six leading anti-war universities in the country during
the sixties. |
photo Richard Calef
The morning after, survivors of the battle await transport
*
"The camp was full of dazed men, drained of feeling, shaken by
what they had been through and frightened by what yet might
come."
- David Maraniss
______
Ball Of Confusion (That's What The World Is Today) , by the Temptations |
Fagan Publishing Co. postcard
Union Terrace, University of Wisconsin |
JJM Did the typical University of Wisconsin
student of the time know much about the war?
DM I would say probably not. As a matter
of fact, I write about the diversity of the school, and at that point, the
largest club on the campus was the Young Republicans, not the Students for
a Democratic Society, so it had an interesting mix of viewpoints. The average
student was probably just starting to get a glimpse of what the war was all
about in 1967. There were approximately two or three hundred real activists
committed to opposing the war day after day, and thousands other students
who were just starting to think about it, largely because of the draft and
their own concerns about what they would do if they had to fight in it. |
| JJM There was a sense among some of the
local citizens that the campus radicals were actually outside agitators.
DM Yes, that is always the case at a school
like Madison, which does have a lot of out-of-state students. There was always
a sort of parochial pressure to keep these students away, and to not
"contaminate" the good ol' Wisconsin kids. But, in fact, the administrators
of Wisconsin understood that an essential part of Wisconsin's greatness as
a university was to attract students from everywhere.
JJM
Dow Chemical public relations director Ned Brandt said, "I would hate
for Dow to come out of Vietnam with the 'Merchants of Death' label that was
pinned on du Pont after the first World War; and yet, unless we come to grips
with this problem, it is likely to happen." What did Dow expect the
Pentagon to do to shield them from the potential of this sort of criticism?
DM Beginning in 1966, Dow was becoming the
target of the anti-war protestors on campuses all over the country. By
the time Dow got their recruiters to the University of Wisconsin campus again
in October of 1967, there had been dozens of protests on college campuses
against Dow. They were upset that they were becoming the focus of the protests
instead of the military that was using napalm, which Dow Chemical Company
made. Consequently, they were hoping for the Pentagon to somehow take the
burden away from them, which was an unrealistic expectation since the Pentagon
stayed away from college campuses, while Dow came there to recruit. So Dow
became an easy target. Couple this with the effect of napalm, which was a
sort of jellyied gas that burned and melted flesh at two thousand degrees
Fahrenheit. It was an obvious awful symbol of the war, and as a result
Dow could not avoid these protests.
JJM
Did the University of Wisconsin student protestors generally
agree that the Dow issue was the right one to protest?
DM There was some disagreement about that.
Just as there was an internal debate at Dow about whether they should keep
making napalm -- which was a negative symbol of the war and not a particularly
large part of their business -- there was also an internal debate within
the anti-war movement about whether Dow was a sidelight to the real issues,
and whether it was worth focusing their protests on. |
photo The Daily
Cardinal
"Down with Dow!"
*
"The Dow Chemical Company endorses the right of any American to
protest legally and peacefully an action with which he does not
agree.
Our position on the manufacture of napalm is that we are a supplier
of goods to the Defense Department and not a policy maker. We do not
and should not try to decide military strategy or policy.
Simple good citizenship requires that we supply our government
and our military with those goods which they feel they need whenever we have
the technology and capability and have been chosen by the government as a
supplier.
We will do our best, as we always have, to try to produce what
our Defense Department and our soldiers need in any war situation. Purely
aside from our duty to do this, we will feel deeply gratified if what we
are able to provide helps to protect our fighting men or to speed the day
when fighting will end."
- Dow Chemical statement |
photo Connections
Police using billy clubs on the Commerce plaza
*
photo The Daily
Cardinal
Use of tear gas
_______
- White Rabbit , by the Jefferson Airplane
|
JJM What was the University police plan to deal
with a potential disturbance?
DM The University police were led by Ralph
Hansen, who was fairly well liked by the students. He had a good rapport
with most of them, even the anti-war leaders. Hansen and the University police
thought that they would be outnumbered and would require some of the Madison
city police to help them, but they had absolutely no intentions of anything
violent happening that day. They thought that the demonstration would be
an act of civil disobedience where at most they would drag some of the students
out, but everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Some of the city police
who were called in wanted nothing more than to bash in some heads of some
students they considered to be spoiled brat, long haired hippies. The
administration could not come up with a creative way to diffuse the situation.
There were hundreds of people packed into a very small hallway and once the
police came in, all hell broke loose, and heads started to get bashed.
JJM How did the demonstration get so out of
hand? Was it because the plan broke down?
DM It was one of those points where everything
ignited. I don't think you can pin it one specific thing, although the leaders
of the police force losing control of their men was a big factor. Once the
police came into that building, it was almost inevitable that it would turn
out the way that it did, unfortunately.
JJM The San Francisco Mime Troupe played a
part in sparking the demonstration as well.
DM Yes, they happened to be in Madison the
night before. They held a performance at the student union and, following
it, encouraged students to join the demonstration the next day. Several members
of the San Francisco Mime Troupe led the way up Bascom Hill to the obstructive
sit in. They didn't participate in the sit-in themselves, but they
certainly encouraged students to participate.
JJM Weren't they famous for their LBJ skits?
DM The troupe was traveling around the country
at that point, putting on a satirical play that related an old Italian
farce to what was going on in Vietnam, with characters like LBJ and Westmoreland
in the play. |
| JJM
What was the most vivid visual image of the protests?
DM The image that sticks in my mind the most
is of the students stumbling out of the commerce building, their heads bloodied,
and the police encircled by a large throng of thousands of students shouting
"Sieg heil!" at them. That is an awfully powerful image.
JJM I was struck as well by the photograph
of Jonathan Stielstra taking the flag down from atop Bascom Hall.
DM Yes, that is another incident that became
well known. Stielstra, one of the young protestors, was so enraged by what
had happened inside the building that he rode home on his bike to get some
wire cutters, came back and cut the lanyard off the American flag flying
above Bascom Hall. A local photographer who saw it happen got a picture of
the flag falling, and of Stielstra running away.
JJM That pissed off the Madison conservatives
big time.
DM Well, it got the American Legion going,
which offered big rewards to anyone able find who they viewed to be a most
unpatriotic young man. There was a long search for him, which became comical
at one point, because it turned out that Jonathan Stielstra was an identical
twin, and the police authorities had a hard time figuring out which of the
twins actually committed this act.
JJM Didn't he shave or cut his hair or something?
DM One of the brothers had a beard going,
and one didn't. Jonathan wasn't able to grow a beard in time, of course,
to disguise himself. |
photo Wisconsin State Journal
Students shouting "Sieg heil!" at the front of Commerce
*
photo Wisconsin State Journal
"It is incumbent on he who would criticize me to attempt to understand
the kind of life I aspire for, and it is incumbent on me to live faithfully
in accord with those aspirations."
- Jonathan Stielstra |
Jane Brotman
*
"As for today's incident -- I won't be able to respect myself for
not standing up for what I believe in. Would you be able to respect
yourself? I know what I saw, and I can't allow that to happen again.
I know you don't want me to get hurt or involved (I'm not going to
get hurt), but I must take a stand. And in this case, my stand
coincides with the students involved in the protest..."
- Student Jane Brotman, in a letter
to her father written on the morning following the protests
___________
The "Fish" Cheer , by Country Joe and the Fish
|
JJM Jane Brotman, an apolitical student
from New Jersey, witnessed the protest, and while she claims it had no impact
on her politics, she felt she had a "personal responsibility" to go to the
rally and make a statement about the police actions she witnessed. Following
the police action, were the average University of Wisconsin students like
Brotman protesting the war or reacting to the sight of the police brutality?
DM I think it was a combination of the two.
The police brutality became the issue for a short time, and that created
some debate within the anti-war ranks, because they considered it a secondary
issue that took some focus away from the war protests. But to someone like
Jane Brotman, who came to Wisconsin that fall still leery of the anti-war
rhetoric and long hair culture, witnessing this event where her student peers
were being bashed over the head did have a profound effect. First, it just
made her think of the police brutality, but within a few weeks, she was studying
the war and starting to change her feelings about that as well.
JJM She wrote a letter to her parents explaining
that she would miss a test because she wanted to take part in a protest.
DM Yes, she was on her way to a review for
a French exam when the protest happened. The exam was held the next day but
she chose to skip it. She wrote a long letter to her parents, which she later
called an awakening. For the first time in her life she was thinking about
what it means to follow authority, and questioned America's foreign policy
and the affects of napalm on people and the actions of Dow Chemical. She
started to think about these things in a way she never had before. And I
think that for millions of people of our generation, there were moments of
awakening. For some people in Wisconsin it was that event, for others it
was something else, but I think it was emblematic of what was going on for
people of that era. |
| JJM
There were moments of awakening for so many of us, and the war impacted all
of us, LBJ certainly being one of them. He said "We have almost lost the
war in the last two months in the court of public opinion. These
demonstrators are trying to show that we need somebody else to take over
this country." Did the protests at Wisconsin accelerate his thinking
towards an inevitable resignation?
DM At the moment that this book takes place,
in mid-October, 1967, I think President Johnson was flailing away, feeling
that he was losing both the war itself -- although only privately would he
acknowledge that -- and the war of public opinion in the United States. It
was right at this time that he was talking to his war council about not running
again for re-election, and they were trying to talk him out of that. And
he was also wondering how they were ever going to win the war. So, yes, it
was a really critical time for Lyndon Johnson, right when he was losing his
grip on the war and the anti-war. He was obsessed by it. Every day he would
ask for reports on the battles in Vietnam, and the number of enemy soldiers
killed. He would also ask for whatever dossiers the FBI and other agencies
could provide him on the anti-war leaders. |
Lyndon Johnson
*
"We are very divisive. We don't have the press, the newspapers,
or the polls with us, although when I get out into the country, it seems
different than it is here." |
JJM You did a great job of tying everything together
in the epilogue. Many of the key people in the book, as it turns out, have
quite a lot in common, and you were able to get together with many of them.
In the epilogue you write, "There was no way they could have known then,
but if the Dow demonstrators had made Agent Orange their target, their struggle
might have linked them more closely in common cause with thousands of returning
Vietnam veterans, and furthered the notion that their protests were meant
to save the lives of American soldiers." Did you talk to the surviving
soldiers on either side about the effects of napalm or Agent Orange?
DM Yes I did. We visited the site of the
battle, and Agent Orange was used extensively in this location, after the
battle. There were many reports about illnesses of villagers in that area.
It is hard to make the direct scientific link, but the evidence is there.
There are cancer clusters in that area. Many of the soldiers in this battle
wonder if the second-generation leukemias that some of their children are
getting are related to Agent Orange, which is also something that scientists
are studying. So it was very much a concern for the survivors of the battle.
photo Linda Maraniss
Foes in '67, Clark Welch and Vo Minh Triet revisit the battlefield
35 years later
________
Universal Soldier , by Donovan |
JJM An interesting point you made in the
book was how the North Vietnamese dealt with the American weaponry, including
napalm, drawing them so close in during the fighting that they wouldn't be
able to use those weapons. You used the phrase of "grab them by the belt
and hang on."
DM Yes, that was sort of the metaphor that
the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese used for fighting against the Americans.
They were overpowered in terms of both artillery and air power. The Viet
Cong had no air power, and Americans had considerable. They tried to overcome
that by going underground in these extensive tunnels they had throughout
the countryside, and by staying close to the Americans so that when they
did have fights it was hard for artillery and air power to be effective.
JJM
Did you talk to Clark Welch about the events of Madison?
DM I did, yes, as well as to other soldiers.
At the time that all this was going on, they didn't know too much about what
was going on in America, but they didn't like the protests. I wouldn't say
there is a uniform position among the Vietnam vets about the protest movement,
but I think that Jane Fonda, for symbolic reasons, is still sort of the magnet
for their hostility and hatred. As to regular protestors like those in Madison,
there is more of a diverse feeling about it. Welch himself actually told
me at one point that if he had been in Madison at that time, he probably
would have been a protestor himself. |
JJM Miles McMillin, who was the chief editorial
writer of the Capital Times in Madison, wrote during this era, "The
horrible spectacle of violence and brutality on the campus of the University
yesterday is the continuing price this country is paying for the reckless
deception by which we were thrust into the war in Vietnam." Do you
see any similarities with what transpired in Vietnam and what is now taking
place in Iraq?
DM Yes, there are many parallels. I think
there are also several differences that are important to note, including
the lack of a cold war overlay that is going on now. The cold war during
the sixties really prevented the United States from invading the North, or
from bombing Hanoi into oblivion. There were controls on what the Unites
States could do militarily then. And the enemies are far different. The
nationalist movement of Ho Chi Minh can not be compared to the totalitarianism
of Saddam Hussein.
But, having said that, the similarities are large and real, and they mostly
have to do with human nature and the responses of government. The
rationalizations that were used to start either of these wars are questionable,
whether it was the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the Gulf of Tonkin
resolution for Vietnam. I don't think those are the reasons for the war,
but they are the rationalizations that the government gave. As I mentioned
earlier, in October of 1967, LBJ was trying desperately to prove that he
was prevailing, and that the press was getting it wrong. You see those echoes
today. Also, we have soldiers in a place where they don't easily recognize
friend from enemy, and that certainly echoes of Vietnam as well. There are
many similarities even though the situations are different.
*
photo Tom Grady
"I sort of had a pass today and went back to Lai Khe to make sure I left
no loose ends in my company. The brigade commander went his H-13 down
this morning at 0600 and I went back to Lai Khe. It was a good day.
I know now I left everything in good shape and no regrets. I
didn't want to leave this way, of course, but I did it the best way I could.
D Company has a new CO and a new first sgt and is back up to strength
already. The old timers (before 17 oct) have the run of Lai Khe and
we were sure glad to see each other!...What we had is still going strong
in the 'new' company, too. They'll have just as good a company in a
few weeks as we had. Not really, I guess -- there will never be anything
like the Delta Company that we started, organized, trained and brought into
battle. Our 'life cycle' got awfully compressed, but we did more than
anyone expected -- except what I expected -- they did exactly what I knew
they would."
- Delta commander Clark Welch recounting his October 26, 1967 return to the
battlefield to his wife, Lacy
*
Peace Piece , by Bill Evans
___________________________________________________
They
Marched Into Sunlight
by
David Maraniss
___________________________________________________
| Text of a
letter sent by University of Wisconsin student Jane Brotman to her father,
a dentist in Mapleton, New Jersey. The letter was written on October 18,
1967, the day after the student protesting of Dow Chemical, and was composed
at a time she had been scheduled to take a French literature exam.
You tell me that I'm here to STUDY -- to stick my head
in big fat books but to ignore the world around me. Well, there's a basic
principle which you have overlooked, and that is there is more to an education
than learning from books.
College is a big investment. For quite a lot less money I could
have easily gone to the University of Maryland or another school close to
home. I could have read the same books I read here, and for all practical
purposes, I could have gotten a decent education there, too. So why did I
have to go all the way to the U. of Wisconsin?
One of the major reasons for coming to this campus was
due to the great diversification of the student body, and thus to the variations
of existing ideas. In other words, I want to learn, I want to weigh every
idea, I want to open my eyes to everything so I can make the best possible
judgements.
As for today's incident -- I won't be able to respect
myself for not standing up for what I believe in. Would you be able to respect
yourself? I know what I saw, and I can't allow that to happen again. I know
you don't want me to get hurt or involved (I'm not going to get hurt), but
I must take a stand. And in this case, my stand coincides with the students
involved in the protest...
I want to make something clear: today's student strike
had nothing to do with the left, the right or the conservatives. It was merely
a general consensus of a great deal of the student body in reaction to the
police brutality which took place on this campus yesterday. I honestly feel
that if you had seen the unwarranted brutality that I witnessed, there would
be no doubt in your mind as to the only action to take.
There is something else you must realize objectively.
I respect your ideas and opinions very highly, for I realize that you have
experienced many things during your lifetime. Yet I cannot possibly accept
every one of your ideas, goals, or whatever, simply because you feel they
are right. I must think about your ideas along with other ideas and evaluate
them to the best of my ability. Then, and only then, can I accept or reject
an idea (be it yours or someone else's). For I am a human being, too; I have
a head and I want to make use of it. You can't possibly ask me, or demand,
that I believe in something that I don't. That lies with me. Can you understand
what I'm saying, or am I lacking clarity?
In order to operate as a functioning citizen in society,
one must question and, if necessary, one must stand up for what he believes
in and make himself heard. According to what you believe in, the Germans
under Hitler acted in a justifiable manner - they didn't question and they
didn't stand up to make themselves heard. They accepted something without
thinking about it.
Does this mean that I am a liberal? A communist? A left
winger? I don't think so. I would rather think that I am a responsible individual
who is ready to grow up, and trying to do so.
I miss you a lot and love you,
Jane
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About David Maraniss
JJM Who was your hero?
DM I loved baseball when I was a little kid,
and my hero during that time was Roberto Clemente. Even though I grew up
in Wisconsin and loved the Milwaukee Braves, there was something about Clemente
that seemed so beautiful and graceful.
*
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and
the author of two critically acclaimed and bestselling books, When Pride
Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi and First in His Class: A
Biography of Bill Clinton. He is also the author of The Clinton
Enigma and coauthor of The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His
Fate and "Tell Newt to Shut Up!" He lives in Washington,
D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Linda. They have two grown
children.
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David Maraniss products at Amazon.com
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This interview took place on November 17, 2003
*
If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Berkeley free speech movement historian Robert Cohen.
*
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Other
Jerry Jazz Musician interviews
* Text from publisher. Excerpts and photos used with the permission of the author.
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